Coffee Trends

Have you noticed a difference in the way coffee is marketed these days? With more ingredients to sweeten it, crunchify it, make it foamier… it makes coffee sound like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Marketing tie ups with movies give creative spins on espresso-based and non-coffee drinks alike. They highlight sweet mixed drinks as something to be enjoyed the same way coffee is enjoyed.

Look at advertisements and posters inside (and outside) coffee shops. The minimal use (or even lack) of coffee in many of the drinks seems to be pointing at something. Could it be climate change affecting coffee production? It’s plausible that the coffee businesses are simply bracing for a future of more expensive coffee, hence they are already gearing the coffee drinking public to settle for less coffee in their drink, then perhaps the coffee will not be missed so much?

New names, new spaces

But another thing to notice about the coffee drinks that are popular these days is how they are presented on the menu. Where before you can have a general idea of what’s on the menu—for example, espresso-based drinks (latte, americano, macchiato, etc.), coffee brewed in different ways (drip, cold brew, siphon brewed), coffee mixed with certain ingredients (café au lait – with milk, yuenyeung – with tea, Vienna coffee – with cream, affogato – with ice cream, mocha – with cocoa, café miel – with honey)—now you have fancy names that need a little copy below for you to understand what it is.

Some new coffee shops have menus that look like Asian milk tea menus. They hint at targeting a coffee drinking public that hail from a milk tea drinking background. Other new shops focus on bathing their clientele in bright interiors and seating them in hardly any comfortable seats, so they can look through windows that let all the light through, while the bar in the center takes up all the space. I suppose such coffee shop interiors work these days because people are not looking for a “third place” anymore, but rather a place to be seen… while sipping coffee-based drinks.

Creativity

While I appreciate the creativity that brews behind-the-scenes in the coffee business, I think it pays for consumers to know what they really want and not just let what’s being served out there to rule what goes into their cup. This thought came to me as I was looking for coffee to take home one morning: I had thought to pass by one of the newer coffee shops around to try out their coffee, but when I got to see the menu, I didn’t quite understand it—every order on the menu looked like something uncanny was mixed into it, and there was no plain brewed coffee in sight. I ended up leaving the shop and going instead to our usual café around the corner, where I was able to buy what I wanted.

We consumers should not be reeds that are easily blown by the trends in the market; let’s consume with a head on our shoulders and not bend to every trend. For instance, just because many clothing shops are selling hanging shirts and bra tops, more women walk around clad in them—and while that may simply be credited to personal taste, I wonder how many have bought these articles of clothing simply because they were there—and as we say here in our country, they are “uso” (on trend).

Coffee is just one kind of product, and clothing is another. And this idea of choosing what we really want to buy applies to all other sorts of products in the market. Many consumers forget this, but the truth is that everything we allow to be sold to us becomes a little more common, a little more permanent in everyday life. It’s something to consider!

"While I appreciate the creativity that brews behind-the-scenes in the coffee business, I think it pays for consumers to know what they really want and not just let what’s being served out there to rule what goes into their cup."